Tag Archives: Media

Dystopia Fetishism and the Fall of #Solidarity

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Two weeks ago, I sat in this same warm office, look­ing out at the cold world out­side. And this is what I saw. I saw Lau­rie Penny’s Spi­der Jerusalem-esque piece for the New States­man, cov­er­ing the stu­dent riots, and I saw Wik­ileaks prepar­ing to dump 250,000 clas­si­fied US Embassy cables on the world. It all felt like a sud­den rush towards the hor­rid, glo­ri­ous dystopia that as a British cit­i­zen I am required to fetishise. (c.f. H.G. Wells, George Orwell, John Wyn­d­ham et al.)

One of those retains the abil­ity to stir up more trou­ble. The other, I fear, is now a lost cause.

Being approx­i­mately a social­ist, and hav­ing voted for the Lib­eral Democ­rats as I felt they were the only almost-credible party of the Left, I was almost warmed by the scale of the protests — not only were the Lib Dems’s bro­ken elec­tion promises not being taken lightly, but only six months in to a gov­ern­ment of the centre-Right, we were already see­ing the peo­ple up in arms.

The vio­lence involved in some of those protests, of which I of course do not approve, was referred to in the media at the time as being the actions of a “hard core” of pro­test­ers intent on stir­ring up trou­ble. The reac­tion of the pro­test­ers to that was often along the lines of “no, we all feel that strongly!”.

I won­der if they’ll be say­ing that this morning.

Last night, as it became appar­ent that the protests were inef­fec­tive at con­vinc­ing more than half of the Lib Dems to vote against the pro­posal, some pro­test­ers attacked a car car­ry­ing the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Corn­wall. Nat­u­rally, this made the front page of every news­pa­per in the coun­try (Guardian, Inde­pen­dent, Tele­graph, Mail, Sun, Mir­ror, nice pay­wall there, Times).

The Twit­ter hash­tag #sol­i­dar­ity has been used by the pro­test­ers and their sup­port­ers for a while now — I do hope some of that sol­i­dar­ity remains. But aside from amongst stu­dents, schoolkids and twenty-somethings who still fondly remem­ber their uni­ver­sity days, I sus­pect that sol­i­dar­ity just took a mas­sive hit.

The tabloid press was never going to be kind to stu­dent protests, but if they were qui­etly depriv­ing them of col­umn space before, by god they are not any more. The attack on Prince Charles’ car last night was one of the most impres­sive acts of shoot­ing one­self in the foot I have ever seen.

My great­est fear over the whole mat­ter, though, is the effect it has had on the young — the peo­ple whose edu­ca­tion was at stake. What have they learned over the last few weeks?

That break­ing into Mill­bank Tower, that light­ing fires and putting bricks through win­dows, that spray­paint­ing walls and break­ing down doors, that being ket­tled by riot police and attack­ing the Royal Fam­ily, isn’t enough. It’s not changed the minds of more than a dozen peo­ple inside the House of Com­mons, maybe none at all.

So what’s left to do? Give up hope and aban­don what mea­gre trust remains in our politi­cians, hop­ing that by the time the pro­test­ers reach mid­dle age they’re elec­table and their opin­ions haven’t changed? Or protest harder, get ket­tled more viciously, dream­ing of glo­ri­ous rev­o­lu­tion while all around the coun­try turns against them?

Dystopia is a great thing to expe­ri­ence for two hours of a film or two hun­dred pages of a book. But when you have to live in it, two weeks is about the point at which it stops being fun.

Stuxnet is in the hands of Bad Guys?!

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Hey! Do you like fear? Do you like bull­shit head­lines? Well, has Sky got an news for you! “Super virus a tar­get for cyber ter­ror­ists”, which bears the even more fas­ci­nat­ing <title> tag of “Stuxnet Worm: Virus Tar­geted At Iran’s Nuclear Plant Is In Hands Of ‘Bad Guys’, Sky News Sources Say”, is their lat­est fan­tas­ti­cal fear­mon­ger­ing piece. Let’s butcher it together.

(Thanks to Chris of Cam­paign Reboot for tweet­ing this story. He beat me to it with his post “Sky News, work­ing hard to prove they’re morons”.)

So, shall we start from the top?

A super virus that was used to dis­rupt Iran’s nuclear programme…

Poten­tially — though there has been no admis­sion from the nation that it was successful.

…has been traded on the black market…

Got any evi­dence, Sky? No? Okay then. Granted it’s not infea­si­ble, but it would be nice to know if you just made that up.

…and could be used by ter­ror­ists, accord­ing to Sky News sources.

CORN FLAKES COULD BE USED BY TERRORISTS! EVERYBODY PANIC!

Senior cyber-security fig­ures have said the Stuxnet worm — the first to have been used to dam­age tar­gets in the real world…

Almost cer­tainly not, although the inter­net is not being help­ful with sources of pre­vi­ous real-world virus dam­age (except to com­pa­nies’ finances). There’s also no evi­dence that Stuxnet has caused any meat­space damage.

…could be used to attack any phys­i­cal tar­get which relies on computers.

Any phys­i­cal tar­get run­ning Win­dows with attached SCADA con­trollers from one man­u­fac­turer con­trol­ling a cer­tain num­ber of fre­quency con­verter dri­ves made by one of two com­pa­nies run­ning at cer­tain fre­quen­cies. Unless they’re just refer­ring to the Win­dows exploits Stuxnet uses rather than its pay­load, in which case… nope, every other OS is immune. (Source: Syman­tec)

The list of vul­ner­a­ble instal­la­tions is almost end­less — they include power sta­tions, food dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works, hos­pi­tals, traf­fic lights and even dams.

Again, Stuxnet in its known form will cause prob­lems for none of those.

A senior IT secu­rity source said: “We have hard evi­dence that the virus is in the hands of bad guys — we can’t say any more than that but these peo­ple are highly moti­vated and highly skilled with a lot of money behind them.

You can’t say more because you’ve received threats from the FBI if you release this super-secret infor­ma­tion that would be use­ful for pro­tect­ing the world’s net­works? Or because you’re mak­ing it up? Present evi­dence or GTFO.

“And they have realised that this kind of virus could be a dev­as­tat­ing tool.”

Really?! Oh, gosh.

Will Gilpin, an IT secu­rity con­sul­tant to the UK Gov­ern­ment said: “You could shut down the police 999 system.

“You could shut down hos­pi­tal sys­tems and equipment.

“You could shut down power sta­tions, you could shut down the trans­port net­work across the United Kingdom.”

Again, I guess we’ve moved on to talk­ing about a heav­ily mod­i­fied pay­load rather than Stuxnet as it cur­rently exists. And then, it’s only sys­tems run­ning Win­dows, and only until Microsoft patch the two (of five) remain­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties that Stuxnet is known to exploit. (Source: F-Secure)

The Stuxnet attack on the Bushehr nuclear instal­la­tion in Iran is believed to have been orches­trated by a country.

Believed on the basis of spec­u­la­tion, with no hard evidence.

Now experts warn that the West is extremely vul­ner­a­ble to sim­i­lar attacks by crim­i­nal gangs seek­ing black­mail pay­outs or more likely by ter­ror­ist groups.

Crim­i­nal gangs and ter­ror­ists that have extremely detailed inside knowl­edge of man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems, which are prob­a­bly not a com­mon tar­get for either group, and who are dumb enough to rely on a virus that we now have an exten­sive dossier on, which most virus scan­ners now detect and neu­tralise, and for which there are known clean­ing methods.

Stew­art Baker, a for­mer assis­tant sec­re­tary with the US Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, said: “They could shut down power sys­tems, dams, almost any sophis­ti­cated indus­trial process that requires a con­trol soft­ware. Which is prac­ti­cally everything.”

I think we’ve seen this point some­where before.

There has been a rise in cyber attacks in recent years.

On April 8, 15% of all inter­net traf­fic was routed through China for 18 min­utes in a mys­te­ri­ous inci­dent the Chi­nese author­i­ties have denied any part in.

Because it was prob­a­bly an acci­dent rather than an attack, and it’s not as if rout­ing through China is unusual — the event was merely an unex­pected spike. There has been no sug­ges­tion that any unen­crypted sen­si­tive data was inter­cepted by China dur­ing that time. (Source: BGP­mon, plus the more knowl­edge­able com­ments on Slash­dot and Red­dit.)

The Royal Navy’s web­site was shut down on Novem­ber 5, allegedly by a Roman­ian hacker.

In Octo­ber, the UK Gov­ern­ment declared cyber war­fare to be a “tier 1″ threat to national security.

Are those… could they pos­si­bly be… facts?! My god.

But experts say a more co-ordinated effort is needed to tackle attacks, along the lines of the Cyber Com­mand agency set up in the US this year.

It’s the most rea­son­able opin­ion in the arti­cle, and it’s the one you don’t pro­vide a named source for?

So, er, thanks, Sky News. I feel so enlight­ened now.

If you’re look­ing for some more amuse­ment, the YouTube-calibre com­ments sec­tion is pure Retarded Inter­net Com­menter gold, too.

i-Dosing is a Thing Now?

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So, not only does October’s edi­tion of Wired UK sug­gest 4chan in its list of unusual places to make friends online — yup, that would indeed be an unusual place to look — but it seems to have decided to enlighten its read­ers on the won­ders of i-Dosing too.

Wait, what? i-Dosing is an actual thing now?

For any­one unaware, “i-Dosing” is pur­port­edly a tech­nique whereby teenagers lis­ten to music that emu­lates the effects of tak­ing drugs. There are a num­ber of web­sites that claim to offer such music, and I sup­pose it’s pos­si­ble that they actu­ally existed as some kind of weird inter­net non-entity before the Daily Mail went fuck­ing crazy (more so than usual) in July of this year. I wouldn’t, how­ever, be sur­prised if the Mail arti­cle was a ludi­crous prank on the reac­tionary truth-averse news­pa­per, and the web­sites sprung up in the aftermath.

(Some­body linked me to a cou­ple of “i-Dosing” tracks back then. The first was a pretty min­i­mal­ist early-Industrial kind of track, lis­ten­able but hardly trippy. The sec­ond was a poor mashup of early-2000s dance hits, which I turned off just for its abysmal pro­duc­tion values.)

So con­grat­u­la­tions to who­ever gave the story to the Mail, it’s pretty hilar­i­ous in an “oh god the media sucks” kind of way.

To the i-Dosing kid­dies, curse this new-fangled tech­nol­ogy, grum­ble / pipe / slip­pers. What’s wrong with the good old two litres of Coke, some high-volume Prodigy and play­ing Wipe­Out 64 until it hurts to look away from the screen? (Or until your mum called you down for lunch, of course.)

And Wired, seri­ously, i-Dosing is not a thing. At least your side­bar item wasn’t a Mail–esque “OH GOD YOUR KIDS ARE ON DRUGS” piece, but please, can we all let this story die now?

Raoul Moat and the Facebook of Lulz

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For some unimag­in­able rea­son, two weeks and count­ing after the whole Raoul Moat busi­ness kicked off, it’s still plas­tered across the papers. Why? Because some­one cre­ated a Face­book trib­ute page. Face­book refused to take it down. Then the owner removed it. Then some­one made another one. Then the Prime Min­is­ter waded in. And one of Moat’s victims.

My ques­tion is, pre­dictably: why the hell is all this Face­book stuff news?

There is one rea­son and one rea­son only why these Face­book trib­ute groups exist: for the lulz.

Have the Prime Min­is­ter and the tabloid press not man­aged to grasp that there’s not really some sin­is­ter or deranged bunch of peo­ple behind this? Peo­ple join these groups for the lulz; because it’s funny. Do politi­cians really live in such a shel­tered world that they’ve never seen what’s out there on the internet?

The inter­net is context-free inter­ac­tion, a world where you can’t see your friends’ reac­tions or even know if they’ve seen a noti­fi­ca­tion of you join­ing a group. It’s a sin­gle click to join, whether you’re doing it because you believe in the cause or whether you just found it funny. It’s a world where peo­ple try to take down reli­gions just because the idea amuses them. It’s a world where nobody really cares; where “Seri­ous Busi­ness” is only ever used sarcastically.

Gov­ern­ment, media — get­ting offended by Raoul Moat’s Face­book fan club just makes you look ridicu­lous. It’s not just the inter­net you seem not to under­stand, it’s a whole aspect of human nature that comes to the fore in that kind of envi­ron­ment. Hell knows, if Cameron hit the roof about a Raoul Moat trib­ute group, what the hell is he going to do when he finds /b/? They’ll be scrap­ing him off the walls!

I have no mas­sive expec­ta­tion of the most pow­er­ful to gov­ern in a way which every­one would recog­nise as fair and just. But at the very least, can we not expect those in power to under­stand the peo­ple they represent?